Karan Kapoor

I spent 6 years as a software engineer. Here are the lessons I learned in my first year

I came out of college with five hundred solved problems and the belief that engineering was a coding contest. It was not, and this is what the first year on the job taught me instead.

Sep 09, 2023 career · engineering · learning

Originally published on Medium.

Photo by Oluwatobi Fasipe on Unsplash
Photo by Oluwatobi Fasipe on Unsplash

Straight out of college, I was enthusiastic (and still am 😁) about the entire software engineering domain and had a lot of exuberance within me, which I wanted to channel towards building great software.

But all I had done, was a lot of Data Structure and Algorithm problems. I loved solving challenging intellectual problems and solved around 400 to 500 problems across several competitive coding websites for fun.

I thought software engineering was like a coding contest where you solve problems by implementing complex algorithms.

I could not have been more wrong.

The world of Software Engineering had me amazed. Here are some observations I had and the things I learned along the way:

  1. It is not that Software Engineering is not challenging. It is just challenging in a different way. You would need to figure out how different systems interact to deliver a business use case, what services owned by other teams need to make changes, and whether the software passes quality tests, performance tests, regression tests, behavioural tests and much more.
  2. You WILL get stuck and you need to figure your way out of that. Sometimes it would be a technical problem, while sometimes it would be a non-technical issue such as approaching a different team or having manager 1:1s.
  3. You might get intimidated by the breadth of things out there. I was. Take a breather. You don’t need to know everything upfront. Nobody is quizzing you. Just try to get good at collating and learning stuff you don’t know about.
  4. I failed a lot. In fact, I always keep a resume of my failures handy in my Notion database. It helps me to know what things I should not do again. What helped me is to be a feedback sponge. It is okay to make mistakes. Be humble. And strive to be better each day. Excellence will follow.
  5. It helped me to work from the office. I listened carefully to discussions around me, especially when they covered topics I wasn’t familiar with. This way I always had a backlog of things to learn.
  6. Lastly, being with a buddy or a mentor goes a long way. I am lucky I found one early on. A good mentor will be the catalyst you need in your journey, no matter what domain you are in.

I feel like these lessons have shaped me to be a somewhat better engineer.

I hoped that some of you would be able to benefit from these as well.

This is a series I am starting for each of the last six years. And, there are a bunch of more interesting lessons coming up.

Hoping to see you for the next one!

You can follow me on Medium if you would like to have more such stories from me recommended by the Medium Recommendation System.

Feel free to reach out on Linkedin if you are looking for any advice, just want to hit me up for a chat or want to get more regular updates on my journey.

Originally published on Medium.